I'm currently reading "The Concept of the Political" by the aforementioned author, and I strongly recommend this book to anyone who's serious about working within liberal-democratic state parameters. The book hinges upon the friend-enemy distinction as the basis of the political -

"It is irrelevant here whether one rejects, accepts, or perhaps finds it an atavistic remnant of barbaric times that nations continue to group themselves according to friend and enemy, or hopes that the antithesis will one day vanish from the world, or whether it is perhaps sound pedagogic reasoning to imagine that enemies no longer exist at all." (p. 28)

- Schmitt is completely hostile to pluralism and liberal democracy because they refuse to identify their enemies, and so therefore cannot defend themselves. In today's context, the enemy is clearly the ethnic and cultural groups whose interests are inimical to those of the West.

"The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy." (p. 33)

My copy of the book was published by University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0-226-73886-8 (paperback)